Stardate 20030623.1910

(Captain's log): A few days ago, Robert was engaged in an email exchange about North Korea with RJ, and copied me on one letter he sent to RJ in hopes I'd comment about the military reality. They were discussing certain articles which had been posted a couple of months ago by Stanley Kurtz, and Robert seemed to think that Kurtz was overstating the situation. In some ways he was and some ways he wasn't, and I thought I might amplify a bit on it here.

Color coding: Kurtz quotes are in red. Robert's comments are in blue. My comments are unindented and in black.

Before I begin, I'd like to clarify the North Korean strategy. There is no chance of North Korea invading the south and actually winning the war. But I don't think even the leaders of North Korea think that's possible.

What they can do is to create a conventional-arms version of "Mutually Assured Destruction". MAD was the basic strategy of the Cold War. The question was how you avoided fighting a limited nuclear war; the answer was to adopt a policy of not doing so by automatically escalating to full-scale nuclear exchange on any use of nuclear weapons by the other side. With a sufficient ability to launch missiles which were deliberately targeted at cities and industrial complexes, any fullscale nuclear strike against the Soviet Union would have caused damage and casualties which would have been totally intolerable to such members of their ruling class who survived the war.

Of course, in doing so it was assumed they'd do the same to us. It amounted to saying that in the case that they used – or even threatened to use – a single nuke against us, we'd obliterate them even though it meant we ourselves would be obliterated in turn. And because of that, neither side ever engaged in nuclear blackmail during the Cold War. (The Cuban Missile Crisis was as close to a test of that as happened, and it was much too close and gave both sides a massive scare. No one ever engaged in that kind of pressure game again.)

On a different level, that's what NK is trying to do. They're trying to make it clear that if they feel themselves to have been pushed too far, then they'll attack south. It's not that they think they'll win; they know they'll lose, and their regime will be obliterated (either with nuclear weapons or by conventional force of arms). It's that in doing so they will be able to inflict intolerable damage on South Korea directly, and on us indirectly through economic effect of having the SK economy collapse, as well as in other ways (e.g. direct military casualties).

In all plausible scenarios, if shooting starts it's going to be a lot worse for NK than for us. But that's not the question; it's a question of whether we'd think that what happened to us was acceptable. And that's an absolute judgment which is pretty much not affected by whether we hurt them even worse than we ourselves get hurt.

Keep this in mind in what I write below. NK winning is a non-issue; no one on either side is thinking in those terms. Our ability to devastate NK in the war is also a non-issue; they know it and don't care. The question is whether they could cause damage to the South we would find intolerable.

Think of it as an entire nation strapping on an explosive belt and trying to die in an attack against their enemies. You can't deter a suicide bomber by threatening to kill him after he makes his attack; he's already decided to die because he hopes to hurt you when he does.

If they decide to go postal, and commit suicide while trying to hurt us as much as possible, would we consider the result acceptable? What are we willing to do to prevent that from happening?

The government of North Korea hopes that we'll be willing to do a lot, because in times past we've been willing to bribe them to avoid that fate. All of their threats, all of their bluster, are intended to try to scare us into paying them off so that they don't commit suicide and hurt us badly as they die.

War is violence intended to accomplish a political goal, and the threat of war is a way of extorting concessions from the other side. If the threat is credible and serious, then there's a chance that the concessions will be substantial.

They would quickly destroy Seoul with a massive artillery barrage from hardened bunkers,

I keep reading this and wondering from whence it comes. Assuming we are well prepared for hostilities, anything that shoots is dead within a few minutes. The artillery barrage that is hypothesized lasts for hours or days.

and would at first overrun much of the Korean and American army with a massive land attack.

No chance. The ROK was good enough in the 80s and is presumably better now. They also have bunkers. NK army is starving. Further, massive air superiority will annihilate anything that moves.

It's not that straightforward. We don't have infinite capacity, and if the attack is large enough it can saturate our defenses. If you're charged by a wolf and you have a rifle, you can shoot it before it reaches you. If you're charged by 50 wolves, the fact that you have 100 bullets for your rifle may not do you any good if you only have one rifle and it is bolt-action. Each bullet you fire can kill one wolf if you're a crack shot, but can you drop all fifty before they reach you and tear your throat out?